On matters of love.

I've heard a lot of opinions in my 50+ years on this earth, about what love is supposed to be. Most of which I have found to be testosterone laced bovine excrement. I've always felt that when you love someone you will want to make their time on this world easier, and their feelings will matter to you just as much as your own do.

Love is so easy to recognize and yet so many people are fooled by a bastardized form of love, that it is truly disheartening. Why do we so often compromise, on what we are willing to accept as love? Are people everywhere so afraid that love will not find them, that they are willing to settle for being ignored, forgotten, overlooked, mistreated, and even abused? Why are people so willing to settle for someone that they don't love so often that they find themselves being the one who is ignoring, forgetting, overlooking, mistreating, and even abusing someone they say they love?

When did we as a people give up on love? All the signs point to this being the truth of the human condition. We were taught that we could judge a tree by the fruit it bears. If we hold to this idea, then mankind, save for a scarce few couples, have given up on love altogether.

If you examine a relationship and find that it is not what you know love to be, do you admit it to yourself and your betrothed, or do you swallow hard and try to make it work? Some would say you have to work on it, but I say we all deserve someone who loves us with the same sense of adoration and a desire to ease our way through this life.

If you are in a relationship and you do not love the other person, then saving the relationship is only a cruelty to both of you. I believe this is why we have relationships that degrade into ignoring, forgetting, overlooking, mistreating, and abuse.

I am one who came from a family that had no love. They had none for me, none for each other and none for themselves. They never learned that they had a right to wait for love. My mother married to escape being a teenage surrogate mother to her siblings at age 15. What she got was not a ride to a new and better life by the man she adored and who adored her. What she got was left with three kids of her own to raise when her hero put a bullet through his own head rather than face the child abuse charges and court martial.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't think relationships are about skipping hand in hand through the meadows of life while butterflies flutter by tickling your noses. Life can get hard. That's just how life is. Just like the world we live on, the world we live in has some really rough terrain. In this life there are mountainous obstacles we must conquer, deserts of despair that cannot be avoided, and swamps of depression that we must travel.

All I'm saying is if we have to go through this life with someone, it's a lot easier to go through it with someone who cares how hard it is for you as much as you care about how hard it is for them. Isn't it easier to go through life with someone that you know won't just exploit your tears? Your dreams? Your fears?

All I've ever wanted out of this life is to know that I was not alone, that there was someone who could care about me. Someone whose life felt just as hollow without me as mine felt without them. If that made me a fool, then I was a fool for love, and there is no dishonor in being a fool for love.

I think most of us have tried to put a love choke hold on someone we cared about, but as I grew older I came to realize that you can not wrestle love down, tie your love 'round 'em and throw your hands up in an "I got mine first!" triumph without those around you knowing just how young you truly are.

So what changed? Well, my mind did I reckon. I made up my mind that I wasn't willing to compromise anymore. I had decided that until I found someone who really mattered and that I really mattered to, that I wasn't going to settle anymore. Now, I don't like myself very much when I'm single. I'm as honest as I can be with women about my intentions, but too many women come from the position of "I can change that about you." when seeking a partner.

I call the women that I have left behind me in those times "body bags." I call them this not out of some sense of disrespect, quite the opposite actually. I call them this because I know what it is to be in love alone. I have been in love alone, and felt it was a walking death. With this in mind while I look down the road I've traveled to reach this position I see the road scattered with body bags, and can't help wanting to warn those who are walking the same path. Make them mindful of the devastation they will leave behind them.

If you want love, then be willing to give love, and be willing to wait on love. It will come. It will arrive when you are not looking. It always has. One cannot scope love out. Love has a way of blind-siding a person. But be honest with someone if their advances are not what you wanted. Both you and they deserve that honesty. Keep in mind what living in a loveless relationship has done to you before. Gauge your intentions regularly.

Love should grow, if it does not then it was never love to begin with. When love is new it feels strong, now this is mostly hormonal and deals more with lust than love, but if your love is to grow it must be nurtured. Measure your love as carefully as you would a growing child. I measure mine at every pass.

You will see the the mile markers along the road of life. Points in our lives where we stand back to get a good look at our lives and measure how we are doing. Some of us use our age like it's some sort of dipstick of life. As if we have approximately 80 years of service so we should have this much gunk on our stick or so much fuel in the reserve tanks, just in case we need to cut weight and ride solo for the rest of the ride. If this is how we measure our love, then what do you think we can hope to find?

Nurturing love can be a lot of work but like a garden the more honest attention you give it the more beauty you can find in it. If you look with a heart that has honorable intentions, then you'll see an effort that has gleaned a beautiful bountiful return, but if you go looking with a heart that seeks only the possibility of thorns that can be cast accusingly, then that is all you will find you've grown.

More often than not it is our own vision of life that is distorted, and not life itself. Life is no respecter of persons, nor does life lay in wait for a person and pounce at every opportunity. If you see a repeating pattern of getting involved with someone only to find that they are doing the same thing your last ex did, then chances are that you are being given the opportunity to learn something about yourself that you might want to change.

People tell me all the time that they wish they had what I have. They wish they could have the kind of relationship that I have. That they wish they could find that in their lives. To them I say. You have to stop looking for it and let it find you, and once it's there treat it with the respect it deserves. You can't find love, it comes to you, but you can lose it, and it can be killed. It can be ignored to death. It can be denied to death. It can be mortally wounded. You can hurt love so much that it turns it's back on you. (thanks for the mention)

We've all been told about how what you put into a relationship is what you'll get back, but most of us don't see it coming back in like measure. "Well I put love out there but all I got back was a cheating bitch or bastard." Really? Have you ever been the cheating bitch or bastard yourself? Not even in your heart? Look with an honest heart. Most of us only keep repeating the lessons we need to learn. If you feel you've learned this lesson I guess it's time to ask yourself why you feel it necessary to continue flogging yourself with a particular truth. Many of us punish ourselves for our past transgressions until we are satisfied that we've learned our lesson.

Just remember that when you point the finger of accusation at another you have three of your own fingers pointing right back at yourself. These are more than just metaphorical fingers. They stand out there for all to see, and seem only to go unnoticed by the accusing pointer. I was taught that "in like measure" means that if I dole it out with a teaspoon I'll get it back from a teaspoon but if I've been shoveling it out there, I'd better be prepared to have it shoveled right back at me. Many of us have done a shit load of shoveling, so it takes us a while to crawl out from under the shit load we actually had coming all along.

I was nearly 40 years old before I made it out from under the pile of shit I'd caused myself. Hopefully by posting this page I can convince some of you to decide a little sooner than I did, that you've shoveled enough out and maybe its time to just work on crawling out from under that pile of testosterone-laced bovine excrement while you wait on love.